Gaskets for motor vehicles are known, for example, from the Italian patent 1,107,502 and utility model No. 21692 B/83 in the name of the present applicant, which are suitable for forming a seal between the vehicle body and openable parts of the bodywork, such as doors, hatches, the hood and the like, when these items are closed. These gaskets are of the type comprising a deformable profiled strip which is able to be fixed to the vehicle body by being snapped on. The profiled strip has, connected along the straight regions of engagement between the vehicle body and the openable part, a tubular section divided into a pair of separate adjacent chambers, one of which acts as a bellows air chamber and the other as a seat for magnetized material.
These magnetic gaskets represent considerable progress over compression-operated gaskets that do not have a magnetic seal, in terms both of improved sealing and of requiring less pulling action to effect closure.
There is however the technical problem of adapting this type of gasket to the various range of shapes which the engagement region between the fixed and openable parts can assume, particularly in curvilinear regions, and especially when the radius of curvature is small. In very accentuated curvature regions, there are considerable problems relating to deformation and squashing of the magnetic gaskets, which can result in loss of seal, formation of folds and points of discontinuity, or breakage of the gasket after a certain time.